How To Teach Sight Reading With A Pick Your Path Piano Challenge

Sight reading takes focus and concentration. To make something that sounds remotely close to music, your piano students must be fully engaged in the process. The ability to rely on muscle memory gets tossed out the window in the face of a sight-reading challenge.

This required focus is a major hurdle for many of our action-obsessed piano students. Kids who struggle to sit still on the bench or who need repeated brain breaks during a 30 minute lesson are not generally the best candidates for sight-reading success.

For these kids, some inventive teaching is needed to make sight reading happen, and so to help you bring something exciting and innovative to this task, today we are sharing a printable that combines traditional sight reading with game-based learning.

A “Pick Your Path’ Sight Reading Challenge

Today’s sight reading printable is intended to be used with piano students who are working through a level 2 method book. While it is designed to be used with our comic-based piano book series, The Adventures of Fearless Fortissimo, it can also be used as a stand-alone activity.

When teachers think of traditional sight reading, they generally think of instructing piano students to play short musical excerpts that they have never seen before.

This is, of course, the definition of sight reading, but it is not how sight reading should be taught. Sight reading is all about teaching students to recognize the familiar; whether this be a familiar sequence of notes, a key signature, a rhythm sequence, primary chords etc. Therefore, when teaching students to sight read, teachers should focus heavily on teaching them to recognize familiar note patterns… which is the foundation of today’s printable.

Our Fearless Sight Reading printable merges a traditional piano piece with a “Choose Your Own Adventure” sight reading section. Your students will polish their sight reading skills by playing familiar measures of music in unfamiliar arrangements.

If you have piano students who crave music with a good dose of adventure then you’ll want to click here or on the image below to download today’s activity. Note: all required instructions are included directly on the downloaded page.

Piano Repertoire For Action-Obsessed Students

If your action-loving piano students work through traditional method books then they are probably starved for music that gets their heart pumping. The Adventures of Fearless Fortissimo will feed their hunger for heroic, show-stopping tunes. Each book in the collection turns original piano pieces into the backdrop for a thrilling comic adventure.

1 Responses to How To Teach Sight Reading With A Pick Your Path Piano Challenge

Great idea! Alot of students have trouble just seeing and playing a new jumble of notes and it takes more repetition than many can sit still for to make music out of it. This way, they are doing both the familiar and the challenge of new on each replaying! Thank you!